It is among the densest & most allusive books of poems you're
likely to find, filled with fiery intelligence - Joseph Duemer

Biographical
Note.

Candice Ward earned an MFA degree ("with distinction")
from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the 1970s,
when she was also twice a Bread Loaf Scholar. Her work has been
widely published in the U.S.,
the U.K., and Australia
in such print and online journals as Denver Quarterly,
Jacket, Salt, Shenandoah and Stand.
Now retired, she was for many years the managing editor of the
South Atlantic Quarterly at Duke University. She currently
lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and can be contacted at drawcm@yahoo.com.

fromThe Moon Sees
the One

The Moon Sees the One

I see the Moon
And the Moon sees me
And the Moon sees the one
I long to see
(children's song)

the moon sees to night at the end
of its rope, beached to blot
by remote the one way back

a baker's blank so white, so late
as the face on magritte's mother
undercover still a looker (me

with my aptitude for pathos-
of-distance learning): listen,
duckling, it goes for the throat

thrush or strep, whistle-stopped
as the little red train makes
tracks, makes history of us

putting a saint in it and pulling
away, while overhead the night
gowns for cover (her face)

all wet but none the wiser than
what is is left of memory: your
darrow songs, my debs rebellion

for in your father's house
of cheats are too many
dimensions—and the moon

looks on, indifferent to
its own mystery, to
the children gazing back

from an orphan age
already history

Waltz Don’t Run

no
shed no tear(Bob Marley,“No Woman No Cry”)

(1)

down said beauty
burn aloud she
simmer her pretty

white tangle foot
tap she beauty
down at heel

beauty to burn
so pretty foot
her the bill

(2)

her to heel
x-acto dot tap
three dash ditto

tap her trio
dot more ska
for bravo she

may day cry
for pretty aloud
simmer down beauty

(3)

pretty afoot case
slip her mind
in egg polonaise

beauty spot she
moon in arms
egg her on

up in arms
and the moon
pretty long shot

(4)

a shoe in
pretty foot lost
her moon fit

beauty no less
pretty shoe her
fit she afoot

who the shoe
befit her bought
for lost she

As if grief must

pulse—tuned and wound to paradox, this knot of what
cannot be
undone yet comes undone, as if what comes to grief never goes
to ground nor sorrow ever drown but keeps on waving, kerning
blind as the wheel it would break upon, enjambed
and witless as a compass with one foot stuck in a stranger’s
grave,
rooted to the ground of its undoing, knife to grief, pulse to
loss, premise and proof of touch going into the cut, to
throb, to wring the reeling silence from the rush of
darkness whealing to—flare